Flume Trail
The ride begins from the trailhead of Tahoe Rim Trail on Mount Rose Highway (Route 431) at Tahoe Meadows where the shuttle drops you off. One very important caveat is that the segment of Tahoe Rim Trail that constitutes the first 8.5 miles of this ride is open to bikes only on even-numbered days of the month. Make sure you don’t neglect to take that into account when planning your ride. This portion of the ride starts out by a gentle glide through the idyllic Tahoe Meadows, which seems to be fairly popular with families and casual trail users. You quickly find yourself climbing as you leave those crowds behind, but the portion of the trail that feels like a real climb is over in less than a mile, just as you’re beginning to warm up. For the following seven miles, this trail closely follows the spine of a ridge that overlooks Incline Village and Lake Tahoe on one side and features occasional views toward Lake Washoe on the other. This is a gorgeous singletrack trail through a boulder-strewn landscape that’s lightly wooded with a variety of picturesque conifer trees. The trail is much more technical than Flume Trail. There are frequent steps and clusters of rocks or boulders. However, it’s not like you need to be a seasoned biker to make it through this trail at all. Much of it is a smooth and sandy singletrack. It’s just that some tricky trail features will arrive fairly frequently, even though inexperienced riders can easily stop and walk a few feet to make it across any of them. There are no steep climbs or descents along this segment, nor many steep drop-offs next to the trail (maybe a couple). As we were doing the ride, my riding buddies and I were unanimous in the opinion that the ride would have been completely worthwhile even if it consisted of this segment on Tahoe Rim Trail alone.
Tahoe Rim Trail eventually emerges onto a wide clearing that is its junction with Tunnel Creek Road. Once you’re there, what separates you from the beginning of Flume Trail will only be a half-mile descent down a steep fire road. The grade of this descent hovers around -13% and the surface is occasionally rutty and frequently very sandy.
Flume Trail starts at a signed junction and continues almost flatly along a steep (sometimes very steep) hillside directly overlooking Lake Tahoe for just over four miles. This trail used to be an aqueduct (a “flume”) that carried water from Marlette Dam. I’ve read that the dam and the flume were built in the late 19th century in order to supply the mining towns of Virginia City, Silver City, and Gold Hill with water during the Comstock silver mining boom. Its use as and conversion into a recreational trail apparently started in the 1980s, mainly through the efforts of Max Jones, as I’ve already mentioned above. Due to its origins as a means of transporting water using gravity, the grade of this trail is an almost perfectly even (and infinitesimal) 0.3%, precisely. The elevation profile plot you see above makes this quite obvious, along with the fact that you’ll be traversing the trail “uphill” on this ride, though this is unnoticeable while on the bike.
The technical difficulty of Flume Trail is low. Almost the entire trail has a smooth and sandy surface that’s hardly ever broken by any rock or root. It’s a wide to medium-width singletrack from beginning to end. While the beginning and end of Flume Trail cut across moderately sloped hillsides, its most recognized stretches are around the middle of its length and are on a much steeper slope. These portions of the trail occasionally feature a steep drop past the edge of the trail and should be traversed carefully by less experienced riders. Some parts of the trail require you to pick your spot carefully when stopping to let an approaching rider or hiker pass by, which will tend to happen frequently due to the popularity of this trail. Still, there is only one short stretch of Flume Trail that feels dangerously exposed, not counting another spot where you’ll have to walk your bike (as suggested by a sign) over some large and sharp boulders that have fallen onto the trail during a slide. In general, riders with less experience should be willing to dismount and walk any spots on Flume Trail where their instincts tell them to.
At the southern end of Flume Trail, you’ll find the trail diving into a short stretch of dense vegetation where it becomes very rocky and technical as it dips toward and climbs back away from a small creek. This is Marlette Creek, and in a few seconds, you find yourself at the edge of Marlette Lake, right on Marlette Dam. This might just be the prettiest reservoir lake I’ve seen in recent years. It’s surrounded by seemingly untouched steep hills covered in conifer trees all the way to the lake’s edge. The ride then follows a flat fire road along the shore of this lake for one mile.
After Marlette Lake, the interesting parts of the ride are behind you. What remains after this is the ride’s last climb (a 0.7-mile stretch where the grade varies but averages around 7% overall) followed by a 4-mile descent, all of it over a mostly featureless and frequently sandy fire road. These final five miles or so of the ride are traversed more out of necessity than for any kind of riding fun and, sadly, there are no alternate bike-legal trails that would be more interesting from a biker’s point of view and would still take you back to your vehicle at Spooner Lake.
One note worth making is about sand: From the beginning of this ride, all the way to Marlette Dam, the trail character varies between moderately sandy and dangerously sandy. This seems to be the ground up form of the (I think) granite that dominates the geography of this area. It’s not as fine as beach sand, nor is it very dusty. But, it does mean that, at least during dry conditions, you’ll need to pay attention to how much front brake you use, how much speed you carry into turns, and how close you stand near the edge of the trail (especially on Flume Trail) where this sand can be very loose and can give out unexpectedly. It also saps your energy and increases the physical difficulty of the ride beyond what you might otherwise expect. Meanwhile, the four-mile fire-road descent at the end of the ride also has more than its fair share of “beachy” spots, though the sand there is finer and dustier. So, if you’re tempted to blast down that descent, you might want to keep that in mind.
While this is a one-way shuttle ride, it’s unfortunately not all a descent. The climb at the beginning of the ride isn’t terribly long (at about 2.5 miles), but I won’t mince words: it’s a tough one. I’m not sure if it’s the frequently extra-steep slope that gets going without a proper warm-up, the shortage of oxygen during a climb from 7700 to effectively 9000 feet, or the fact that I wasn’t in tip-top shape when I tried this ride, but I had to walk much of this climb. Near the very beginning, the climb immediately has you scrambling repeatedly over some jumbles of boulders. This seems to bode badly for the rest of the ride, but things clear up fairly soon, though the tough slope and the continuing existence of occasional rocky obstacles ensure that it’s never easy. Thankfully, the second half of the climb gradually eases off in steepness, but it gets pretty serious again over a short stretch shortly before you reach the top at an elevation of about 8950 feet.
Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride
You arrive at Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride a little after you begin your descent, near an area that’s marked on the USGS topographic maps as “Tucker Flat”. Mr. Toad’s doesn’t start immediately “with a bang” but things turn serious a little more than a quarter mile after you get on this trail. I’ve already described the character of this trail quite a bit above, which I won’t repeat here, but one detail worth noting is that, at some point, this trail encounters a split that is unsigned and ambiguous. This arrives near the bottom end of Mr. Toad’s, around the 7.5-mile mark of this ride. The correct direction to take here for this ride is “straight” but it might be a little tough to figure out especially because the more well worn traffic direction seems to be heading left there. The trail heading left at this junction would connect you in about a quarter mile to Iroquois Circle; a street in the outermost edges of Meyers. That spot wouldn’t be a bad place to end your shuttle ride either, if a shorter ride would work better for you, because the vast majority of the fun trail mileage is already behind you by this point in the ride.
I’ve seen some sources describe tree branches that are inclined to reach out and grab your shoulders around the lower stretches of the Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, but I didn’t observe any example of this during my ride.
About midway through the ninth mile of the ride, the trail turns into a fire road (Forest Service Road 12N01A). On this ride, I followed this fire-road continuation of the trail for less than a mile before turning onto a singletrack shortcut at a reasonably prominent junction. For simplicity, there would be no harm in continuing a little extra distance until you make it to a junction with Oneidas Street and Fountain Place Road (FS1201) and turn onto Fountain Place Road there, which is where the singletrack shortcut takes you anyway. This 0.6-mile singletrack is admittedly more fun than riding on a wide gravel road, but it’s not exactly not-to-be-missed either.
Following two more dirt roads (FS12N17 and Powerline Road) ultimately brings you to a signed junction where Railroad Grade Trail begins. This trail is a mostly smooth and flat singletrack, though parts of the trail appear to be built in a mildly wisty way purely for enjoyment. From that point of view, it’s a fun little trail and even exhibits a few mildly technical features toward its end.